My little place on the web for all things herb-y, homeschool-y, nutrition-y, etc. My goal is for everyone who enters here to learn something, so I hope you do! Please drop me a line if you have a question or a comment.

14 January 2010

Okay, so the holidays are FINALLY over with. Hurray! I have a major love/hate relationship with the holiday season. I'm just glad it's done and I can go back on with regular life. I am still putting together information for a regular blog post, but until then, I thought I'd put up a link to a new site I found, particularly an article, and my own response to it. Hopefully it will prove educational!

From what I know of Canola (shortened form of Canadian Oil Low Acid), one of the main reasons I avoid it is because it’s processed from genetically altered rapeseed. Apparently back in the 40’s, rapeseed was grown to make oil to use as engine lubricant during the war. After WWII was over, they had to find something to do with it, so companies repackaged it as cooking oil. They did the same basic thing with SLS (from coconuts) which was originally used as an engine degreaser and is now used in toothpastes, shampoo, soap, body washes, etc because it causes foam and bubbles. The American populace got a lot of fun things handed to them as left overs from WWII industrialism.

Anyway, the information I’ve found through various widespread places is that rapeseed is a member of the mustard family and naturally contains high levels of erucic acid which is highly toxic. Animals don’t touch rapeseed in the field and it’s known as being quite deadly. They GMO’d it a bit about 40 years ago and continue to do so today so it wasn’t as toxic and can practically be called another species now. I still maintain that it is toxic for several reasons and it has been linked to heart, thyroid, and kidney problems amongst others. I won’t touch it because it’s not natural and I don’t trust it. I never trusted microwaves, even when I was young, and I was right about that. I felt the same way about margerine and always preferred butter, way before reading anything about Weston A. Price. I think if humans follow their instincts about what they put in their bodies instead of mindlessly feeding, we’d all be healthier over all.

So more important than whether it is a traditional oil, though, is that we should look at what it does. You can’t take a plant with a toxic seed and breed it and tweak it to make magic non-toxic oil. That doesn’t work. There will always be residual problems with it. We are not God and we as humans are not meant to drastically alter what God has made. A little regular plant breeding, weeding out the weak and breeding the strong I can understand. That happens in nature usually and even cross-breeding happens in nature. Drastically altering plants to make brand new ones, however, creates an unknown factor in our health.